Translating the Fetish: Lifting the Veil and Demystifying Capitalism
Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism is helpful in understanding how the fetish animates produced commodities to have a mysterious power of their own, in which power is obscured, mystified, and alienated, holding sway over people in the dominion of capitalism. In Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspectives, Lorgia García-Peña asserts that “to translate thus presents us with the possibility of seeing the Other. This act of seeing is also an act of recognition that can contradict hegemonic knowledge.” The work of translating the fetish can thus be presented as a means of revealing real relations hidden by the fetish, an antihegemonic project of deconstructing systems of capitalism and oppression.